Posts Tagged Under: voipnow

The right communications platform for you is the one that delivers. And while there are many ways for customers to communicate with businesses, voice remains the most personal.

And the move today is towards cloud-based solutions. A cloud communications platform is, essentially, a tool that helps your team process communication streams. For instance, Voipnow is a productivity-enhancing, highly efficient cloud communications platform used by many call centers. It makes call center employees more efficient and more productive. And it does so with smart features, previously impossible.

Navigating through such features takes a lot of time and effort. Here’s a quick guide to what you need and why. Essentially, what you want is at least the starter package. And, if you can afford it, get a booster package. These are advanced telephony features that make the difference.

The starter package of any communications platform

Any communications platform should offer you a minimal set of features. These should come as standard. Hence, this tip is simple to understand. If you don’t have these features, move to another communications platform. You might not think you need one of them, but still. Even with extra airbags, you don’t need them until you do. Besides, the starter package features what everyone expects from a top tier business.

1. IVR is a must-have for any communications platform

Interactive voice response, or IVR, is one key feature of any communications platform. Without it, you experience a whole range of redundancies. IVR manages calls for you, redirecting them to the right people. You can configure IVR to simplify call management.

2. Calls with superpowers are a prerequisite

This means you have features such as call monitoring, call control, call recording, call screening. Many of these make a lot of sense. Call control, for example, allows your team to hold, mute, forward or transfer the call.

Call screening is, essentially, a way to filter calls by destination. Meanwhile, call recording is a great feature to have, both for quality control and legal precautions.

Better yet, call barging allows a manager to take part in the conversation. And talk with both customer and team member. It’s a match made in heaven. You can take action right away, whenever necessary. Many times, acting on the spot saves a lot of wasted productivity later on.

3. The Agent should be at the core of the platform

There are many features that enable agents to do better. Process more requests, convert more customers, ensure better flow.

“Local agents” is a typical feature that allows local agents to process several call queues. This enables a quicker response to customer demands. Moreover, you can have some of your agents perform as supervisors. It is a high-volume training opportunity. And your communications platform should offer it.

Booster features of any communications platform

Whichever communications platform you choose, it should be an enabler. Something that offers the best bang for the buck.

Booster features allow you to do a whole lot more than standard features. In a sense, they are the true innovation. Booster features are what makes communications platform stand out.

4. Go mobile with your communications platform

Mobility is more important than ever. After all, most of your customers are mobile. Perhaps it is time for your business to be more mobile too. But this goes further than merely improving mobility features for customers. Here are the hot features you want to go mobile:

Remote agents are a feature that allow your agents to assist customers from wherever they are. This, in effect, responds to an already mobile culture. Besides, it helps accommodate a growing remote work culture. Moreover, it will help you keep in line with the co-working trend.

Cascade calls allow you to take a call anywhere you want to take it. It’s essentially a “follow me” type of feature. All phones (office phones, home lines and mobile phones) ring when you get a call. This means all calls get taken, no matter where the agents are.

Hot-desking and extension virtualization. This is pretty much how calls should happen. By virtualizing phone lines, teams can share desks and physical equipment. Essentially, you are no longer tied to the physical placement. Any phone becomes a shareable resource.

5. Look for enhanced coaching

The best way to transfer experience is through mentoring, coaching and training. Yet no amount of training can cover what you could do live. Hence, the issue. You could use the best training strategy. You could try mentoring and coaching. But you can’t intervene when your trainee is live, struggling. Most of all, it would be an interruption. And interruptions affect performance.

Instead, imagine being right there, next to your trainee. Whispering the right tip at the right time. As unobtrusively as possible. Call whispering is a great way to train, assist, support. When to do it? Just use call monitoring to figure it out. Listen in on any conversation and intervene when needed.

You can even go further. Call barging allows you to step in and talk with everybody. Much like a mini-teleconference. It’s for whenever you need to manage things hands-on. Coaching, however, means that you don’t barge in that much. It still remains a pretty useful feature to have.

At the end of the day, however, you need to know two things. The first is which features work for you. The second is how to have them working for you. After all, your purpose is to provide the best possible customer experience. And not to stumble over features you don’t need. Hence, make sure your next communications platform offers all of the above.

Business communications are getting a do-over. Moving to the cloud is not a new concept anymore. However, there’s plenty to consider. Especially when you move business communications to the cloud.

Business communications are, by all means, the living breath of any organization. They can make or break a business. Especially today. The amount of information sharing is, by all means, unprecedented. And getting ahead is, in fact, staying relevant.

It all started more than 10 years ago. In 2006, VoipNow Platform had just landed on the Unified Communications market. Dutch cloud communication service provider Belcentrale was a new telephony operator from Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

What seemed to be a simple crush grew into a long-term relationship built on respect, professionalism, and mutual trust. This article describes how this partnership unfolded across a decade, in the hope that you will put these insights to good use in your business.

Researchers have discovered and announced a major flaw in one of the building blocks on Linux operating system – the GNU C Library. The vulnerability has been reported as CVE-2015-7547 and was disclosed on Tuesday, February 16, 2016. The vulnerability is in function getaddrinfo() that performs domain-name (DNS) lookups.

We work tirelessly to keep our VoipNow users happy. To that end, one of the things we don’t do is to dump maintenance burdens on them. However, every now and then, VoipNow users are required to perform some actions on their end, such as swapping an old SSL certificate for a newer one.

For those who just landed here by accident, let me make your visit to our blog worthwhile. In plain English, SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a security thing that basically encrypts the link between a server and your computer. It makes it hard for a hacker to eavesdrop on that connection (whatever the reason may be). All of the internet depends on this standard, so it’s not something typical to any software product or service. It’s a fact of life. Now, back to our VoipNow customers

New data from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) shows that companies everywhere are scooping up solutions like SaaS, IaaS and UCaaS to move their operations to the cloud – in part or in whole – marking an unprecedented uptick in adoption.

Industry analysts are baffled at the growth rate of the cloud industry in the past five years. In the UK alone, 84% of businesses have adopted at least one cloud solution to give themselves a technological edge. Five years ago, that number was 48%. Four in five companies have adopted two, or more such applications. These include

Once upon a time you could start a business with your bare hands and rely solely on manpower to grow. Not anymore. Virtually every business today relies (more or less) on technology to stay relevant, increase awareness of its brand and sell, sell, sell.

In its 2015 Global Digital IQ Survey, consultancy firm PWC draws attention to what can be considered the 10 technological commandments for business – 10 attributes that fuel the digital growth engine of an organization

Being in the business of developing enterprise-class communication and collaboration software for over a decade, we know a thing or two about audio and video quality. User experience is crucial when it comes to UC&C solutions. You can have as many features as you like. What matters is to make the best of them.

Studies have shown that “user experience” tops the list of complaints among conferencing users. This includes both the visual experience and the audio experience. UC tools that mess up on these aspects are about as useful as an old fax machine. Without good quality audio and / or video, conferencing is more of a pain than a perk. This is why we’ve placed tremendous focus on the codec side of VoipNow.

The U.S. is ditching copper landlines in favor of IP telephony (about time!), but the FCC is requiring providers to notify customers of such plans three months in advance, as well as supply backup power sources needed in case of an outage. IP telephony has major advantages over legacy phone networks, some of which we will outline in this article.

The regulatory body issued its announcement yesterday, addressing service providers with the following claims:

There’s an undeniable edge to bringing your own device (BYOD) to work. It makes everything more productive and less complicated, this is what company’s employees think. How about IT departments? When using VoipNow Mobile, they are all happy. And to make them even happier, a couple of days ago we released VoipNow Mobile 2.0 that comes with video support, crystal clear HD voice even in difficult network conditions, and enhanced privacy for both voice and video calls.